Women Employees Are Actually Highly Satisfied Working at Google, Except for One Thing

According to data from jobs site Glassdoor, women are mostly satisfied with their jobs at the company.

If you want to know what it's really like to be a woman working at Google, it's best to ask the women.

And women are highly satisfied with the company, according to data from Glassdoor.

There's only one exception but it's a big one: they don't feel as good about their career opportunities as their male colleagues do.

In the aftermath of the controversial Google memo on diversity and conservatism, and the firing of its author James Damore, there's been a non-stop parade of people opining about the company and its treatment of women.

But one Google employee says a critical voice on the issue has been overlooked: that of the women who actually work at Google.

Women at Google rate the company a 4.4 out of 5, compared to a 4.2 for the men at Google And that's far and away above the average 3.3 rating most companies receive on Glassdoor.

Google employee satisfaction ratingsBusiness Insider/Andy Kiersz

The glaring exception

There is one exception and it's a biggie. Women at Google don't rate their opportunities for advancement as high as the men do, according to Glassdoor's data.

Women rate career opportunities at 3.9 out of 5 versus men at 4.2 out of 5.

One reason they may feel this way is that women at the company feel outnumbered. At a recent gathering for women to talk internally about the memo, there was much talk about "how women at Google are a minority," Kovach reported.

And they truly are outnumbered in every way. Women make up 31% of all roles across the entire company. In tech and engineering, the lifeblood of the company, women make up only 20% of the staff. And in leadership roles across the entire company, women make up 25%.

Another reason could be something called "occupational segregation," where women tend to be tracked for lower paid roles than men, Glassdoor's Chief Economist, Dr. Andrew Chamberlain told Business Insider.

It's not a perfect place

One former woman engineer we talked to said she saw this situation happen at Google: a man and a woman would be hired with about the same backgrounds at the same time and the man would start at a higher engineering level, with more pay, than the woman. She felt that bias could be at play in such decisions.

And that's the kind of bias that Google's diversity programs are supposed to counteract.

Other woman feel that they've been given ample opportunities and promotion at the company, including the product designer that spoke with Kovach.

"Google's not perfect. It's not a perfect place for women to work. But that's pretty much everywhere, right?" she said.

"I don't feel like I have any more or less opportunity as a woman here than I did at any of the other workplaces I've been," she added.